Lessons Clinical Supply Chains Can Learn From Freight Audit & Payment
By Laura Hay, senior director, global program management at Trax Group | 2025 Winner, everywoman Customer/Passenger (Leader) Award
At first glance, freight audit and payment and clinical supply chains may appear to operate in completely different worlds. One focuses on transportation transactions, carrier management, and freight spend. The other is responsible for ensuring critical therapies, investigational products, and medical supplies reach patients and clinical sites safely and efficiently. Yet despite these differences, I have always been fascinated by how many of the underlying principles are exactly the same.
Both environments are highly complex. Both involve large volumes of data, multiple stakeholders, global operations, regulatory considerations, and significant financial and operational risks. Most importantly, both rely on the ability to make informed decisions based on accurate information.
Over the years, I have found that some of the most valuable lessons in operational excellence are transferable across industries. In many ways, clinical supply chains can learn a great deal from the practices that have helped leading freight audit and payment organizations improve visibility, efficiency, and performance.
What Freight Audit And Clinical Supply Chains Share
One of the most important lessons is the power of visibility.
In freight audit and payment, organizations process enormous volumes of transactions across multiple carriers, countries, systems, and business units. The complexity is substantial, but so is the opportunity to learn from the data being generated every single day.
Visibility is not simply about collecting information. It is about creating a clear understanding of what is happening across the operation and why.
I have always believed that you cannot improve what you cannot measure. But I would take that a step further and say you cannot improve what you do not understand.
Many organizations today have dashboards full of metrics. They can report on performance, identify trends, and track outcomes. However, the most successful organizations use data for more than reporting. They use it to improve future performance.
They ask deeper questions. Why are costs increasing? Why are delays occurring? Why are certain sites consistently performing differently than others? Why do recurring issues continue to surface?
Data becomes valuable when it drives action.
Why Root Cause Analysis Outperforms Symptom Management
Visibility in complex clinical supply networks is not limited to shipment tracking or KPI reporting. It extends to how forecast assumptions, RTSM/IRT trigger logic, depot inventory positioning, and site demand behavior interact as a single system. Another critical lesson is the importance of focusing on root causes rather than symptoms. If you find yourself solving the same problem repeatedly, there is a good chance you are not solving the problem at all. You are simply managing the consequences.
In freight audit and payment, for example, organizations may encounter recurring invoice discrepancies from a particular carrier. The objective should not be to become more efficient at correcting invoices. The objective should be to understand why those discrepancies are occurring in the first place and eliminate the source of the issue.
The same principle applies to clinical supply chains. If inventory shortages continue to occur, if shipments are repeatedly delayed, or if operational exceptions consistently require intervention, it is worth asking whether the organization is facing an operational problem or a process problem.
The answer is often hidden beneath the surface. A recurring site-level stockout may not originate in logistics at all, but in the interaction between enrollment assumptions, RTSM forecasting parameters, and depot resupply rules that do not fully reflect real-time demand behavior. I frequently use the iceberg analogy when discussing operational challenges.
The issue everyone sees—the delayed shipment, the stockout, the invoice discrepancy — is the small portion of the iceberg above the waterline. Beneath the surface are the factors that actually created the issue. Forecasting assumptions. Process gaps. Communication breakdowns. Data quality challenges. Governance issues. Decision-making behaviors. Technology limitations.
If we focus only on what is visible, we may temporarily resolve the immediate issue, but we are unlikely to prevent it from happening again. True operational improvement happens when organizations investigate what lies beneath the surface and address the underlying drivers of performance.
In distributed clinical supply networks, these underlying drivers often include depot replenishment policies, temperature-controlled logistics constraints, country-specific import and export timelines, and the timing mismatches created when RTSM demand signals deviate from actual enrollment velocity. Another lesson freight audit and payment offers is the importance of effective exception management. The highest-performing organizations do not ask talented people to spend their days reviewing routine transactions. They automate predictable work and direct human expertise toward the exceptions that require judgment and analysis. This principle is becoming increasingly relevant within clinical supply chains.
As supply chains generate larger volumes of data and become more globally interconnected, organizations must be thoughtful about where people add the most value. Technology can process transactions, monitor routine activities, and identify anomalies. Human expertise should be focused on risk management, strategic decision-making, stakeholder engagement, and solving complex challenges.
The goal is not to replace people. The goal is to allow people to spend their time where they can make the greatest impact.
Where Automation Ends And Human Expertise Begins
Exceptions in clinical supply operations are often driven not by standard logistics variability but by temperature excursions, labeling and packaging release constraints, depot allocation conflicts, and country-specific import holds that require human judgment rather than rule-based resolution.
There is also an important leadership lesson embedded in this discussion.
W. Edwards Deming famously said, "A bad system will beat a good person every time." When something goes wrong, it is often tempting to ask who made the mistake. The better question is what in the system allowed that mistake to occur.
Strong leaders recognize that sustainable improvement comes from improving processes, not simply correcting individual errors. While accountability remains important, organizations achieve far greater results when they focus on strengthening the systems that support performance. One observation I frequently return to is this: every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.
If an organization continues to experience recurring delays, recurring shortages, recurring quality concerns, or recurring operational disruptions, those outcomes are providing valuable information about the system that produced them. The opportunity is not simply to solve the issue in front of us. The opportunity is to improve the system so that issue becomes less likely to occur in the future.
These system outcomes in clinical supply environments often emerge from the interdependency between forecasting models, RTSM trigger logic, depot inventory policies, and logistics lead times, where small misalignments can amplify into downstream instability.
Ultimately, the biggest lesson clinical supply chains can learn from freight audit and payment is that operational excellence is not about working harder. It is about creating visibility, understanding the drivers behind performance, focusing on root causes, and building a culture of continuous improvement.
When organizations invest in understanding their systems rather than simply reacting to their outcomes, they create stronger operations, better decision-making, and more sustainable results. When you improve the system, you do not just solve today's problem — you create the foundation to prevent tomorrow's.
About The Author:
Laura Hay is a global supply chain leader specializing in program management, customer success, and account strategy. She has a proven track record of leading cross-functional teams to deliver complex, high-impact initiatives on time and within budget. Laura is known for building strong stakeholder relationships, driving operational excellence, and managing multimillion-dollar programs. She is passionate about connecting people, processes, and technology to build scalable, resilient supply chain solutions that deliver measurable business impact.